Microsoft notices uneven rates of malware infections around the globe

Malware is a huge issue for Microsoft with its business based solely on software. Their bi-annual Security Intelligence Report (SIR) just came out and it shows the intensity of malware attacks from different parts of the world.

The company releases such a report twice each year and this time was no different, with data from over 600 million computers across the world. Microsoft collects, analyzes and reports detailed data related to exploits, vulnerabilities, and malware, and determines infection rates using their custom computers cleaned per mille (thousand) formula.

This formula essentially determines the number of computers cleaned for every 1,000 executions of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), a tool by Microsoft that claims to remove more than 200 highly prevalent or serious threats from computers.

Moving onto the world map for malware, the highest intensity of malware comes from countries like Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Mongolia. On the other hand, countries like Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark remained the healthiest of the lot, with not many infections throughout the second half of 2015. You can clearly observe that even countries including India

You can clearly observe that even countries including India, Mexico and the Middle East have high intensity of computers cleaned. It puts them at a high risk due to their surrounding nations that cause malware attacks, according to Microsoft.

An alarming change has been the increase of cleaned computers from 6.1% in the third quarter of 2015 to over 16.9% in the fourth quarter. The company claims this massive increase was mainly due to the Win32/Diplugem, a software family that modifies web browsers so that users see extra advertisements while browsing. So, this was not a common trend.